If you’re a blogger, author, contributor or editor of a website you need to read this and think about how it affects your content strategy and reader engagement.
Chances are you spend a lot of time looking for things. Sometimes that means you go to Google (or Bing if you swing that way). You shop, you look for directions, you search for people, you do market research, and you keep up to date with news and weather. Lots of that looking around starts with a simple search engine query. Like most people, you are doing one of three things when you search for something:
- Navigating to somewhere (example: type in a website by name)
- Transacting something (example: type in a brand or product name)
- Information seeking (example: How do I ______?)
As a reader, I search and I want to find the right answer to my question. Google and the major search engines are constantly improving to help me find the needle in the haystack. They use page-rank, my social network, my location, and other signals to help me get to what I want in an ever expanding sea of pages, content, and information.
But… what happens when you turn the paradigm to the publisher’s point of view? If you’re like most writers or authors you do a lot more than just write. You tweet, you post to Facebook, you take and share photos and videos, and you may even have several sites or belong to a network of sites. In fact, the average publisher in the Lijit Network uses six content sources (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) in addition to their main site. Needless to say, publishers create way more content than what might show up on a single site.
As a publisher, author or site owner you want to present to your readers ALL your relevant content when they’re searching for something. You want to present it in a way that is engaging and that of course answers the query. This is important for many reasons to you, the publisher, not the least of which is that it helps you establish a deeper and more trusted relationship with your audience. A reader on your site expresses their intent to find something and now it’s your opportunity to give them what they want so answer their question, engage them! As a general rule of thumb, readers search a site .5% the number of pageviews on the site; more engaging and informational sites get searched as much as 10% of the total pageviews.
Guess what? If you engage your readers more by presenting them relevant information from all your available content then they stay with you longer and come back more often. They view more pages, spend more time on site, and refrain from simply bouncing away. If you can engage a reader by delivering the right search results, they view 3-5% more pages on average than if they didn’t have a positive search experience.
Guess what else? You get incredible information and insights about what your readers care about. For example, 30% of site visitors on average come from a major search engine like Google and each carries with them an important referring search query. Through statistics you gain vast amounts of reader data. What they want to find and what they successfully found. What they searched for and didn’t find. Our CEO Todd Vernon describes these concepts well in a recent post about search results. Pretty important stuff for publishers don’t you think?
At Lijit we built our technology and offerings to help authors and readers connect, engage, and understand each other. It’s the people that listen to their audience and respond to what they want that separates successful publishers from the rest.
